Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 review

Evan Gower October 7, 2009

£483

Price when reviewed

Adobe pretty much invented video-editing software on the PC, so it’s not surprising many of this month’s entrants copied the look and feel of Premiere’s timeline. But the software isn’t the force it once was. Although Premiere was entirely rewritten for the Pro version, it’s still jaded in some areas.

For a start, its software real-time editing capabilities are well behind Canopus EDIUS 2.5 and Pinnacle Liquid Edition 6. You can see reasonable previews of your edits on-screen, though. Premiere Pro can also output the signal via an OHCI FireWire adaptor at the same time – which you can then loop out to a TV monitor using your camcorder. But it doesn’t have the power of its two main competitors to blend multiple tracks of effects-laden video in real-time.

Pro 1.5 also still has limited built-in DVD-burning capabilities. You can now write your project straight to DVD from the Premiere timeline, but this will be a video-only disc with no menus. By comparison, Liquid Edition has built-in menu-authoring capabilities.

Clearly, Adobe would rather you use Premiere Pro in tandem with Encore DVD. Indeed, purchased as a part of the Digital Video Collection, Premiere Pro 1.5 is a much stronger proposition. You can cut and paste sequences with After Effects 6.5. As both use the same plug-in architecture now, so long as all your plug-ins are in both apps, you’ll be able to use After Effects’ more powerful tools, such as Motion Tracking, then take the results back into Premiere. You’ll also be able to use Project Linking in Audition to edit audio dynamically within Premiere via Edit Original. Similarly, Photoshop CS, which now supports non-square video pixels, can also edit graphics.

Overall, Premiere Pro is still a very capable professional application, and its longevity means that it has by far the greatest support from third-party plug-ins. It also has the killer tabbed timeline feature for nested sequences. This is a great way to edit, because it allows you to create sections of your video as separate sequences, then stitch them together in a master sequence. Saveable presets have been added for all filters as well, making it a cinch to reuse effects settings. Premiere Pro will also be the easiest for a Windows user to get to grips with, as it’s a lot more standard than Liquid Edition or EDIUS.

If you add Matrox’s RT.X100 Xtreme editing card, Premiere Pro overcomes its main real-time editing weakness. Without additional hardware, however, its responsiveness falls behind the competition and this is what lets it down.